Renowned caterers Payne and Gunter, working in conjunction with sister company Levy Restaurants at The O2, have released details of the bespoke menu created for The BRIT Awards 2013, held at London’s O2 Arena last night (Wednesday 20th February 2013).
A host of celebrities took to the red carpet for BPI’s 33rd annual BRIT Awards, which featured performances from global stars including One Direction, Robbie Williams, Emeli Sandé and Justin Timberlake. Behind the scenes, Payne and Gunter, who has a nine-year history of catering for the BRITs, and its Levy Restaurants associates at The O2, deployed a battalion of hosts to work at the event.
Three temporary kitchens were constructed in which Payne and Gunter and Levy Restaurants prepared a menu befitting the night’s glitterati guests. The dinner featured a ‘Trio of woodland mushrooms – morel terrine; girolle tart with tarragon cream; and wild mushroom à la grecque salad’, followed by ‘Seared fillet of English beef with slow cooked beef hot pot, butter braised fondant potato, caramelised cauliflower puree, horseradish dumpling and a rich red wine sauce’. Guests were treated to ‘Blackberry and apple macaroon with apple and blackberry salad and blackberry sorbet’ for dessert.
60 chefs, 600 waiting staff and 40 management staff worked on event preparations that started at 9am on the day. It took the catering teams over 2,000 food preparation hours to prep’ this year’s BRITs menu, utilising a staggering 1.5 tonnes of potatoes and over 180kg of winter root vegetables. The starter of ‘Trio of Woodland Mushrooms’ required more than 100kg of wild mushrooms along, whilst pastry chefs had the daunting task of baking and filling 400 trays of macaroons accompanied by 75kg of blackberries for the dessert.
As a live televised event, all 4,000 VIP dining guests needed to be catered for in extremely tight time scales, meaning service had to be efficient in the fast-paced and high pressured environment. Amazingly, it took over 5,500kg of ice cubes to chill all the drinks for the evening’s celebrations.
Bethan James, operations director, Payne and Gunter, said: “We’ve been providing the catering at the BRIT Awards for nine years now, so we are always working on ways to keep our menu concepts fresh and contemporary. It was brilliant to see all our hard work come to fruition last night, and I want to thank every member of the team – from the chefs in the kitchens to the service staff on the floor – for all their hard work.”
